Web 2.0: A view into the pursuit of the Boston Marathon bombers

It’s breathtaking, how rapidly we've gone from the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday, to the release of images of two suspects on Thursday morning, to a violent incident at a 7/11 Thursday evening resulting in the death of an MIT police officer, that led to the eventual capture (and death at a hospital) of one of the suspects (in front of a funeral home, no less), and the continued pursuit of another, in Watertown, MA.

Throughout it all, Web 2.0 delivered all of the drama and connections, as it unfolded.  Six degrees of separation?  With social media, it’s now just one or two degrees of separation.  As events unfolded, all you needed to do was to follow the right people and you’d get the news in real-time.

Separated by 3000 miles, I could watch streaming live news from Boston, follow the real-time tweets of reporters and others involved who would then be retweeted by thousands of others.  The mainstream media, aware of the pitfalls of transmitting information that hadn't yet been confirmed, has held back details that have otherwise been circulated around the internet on social media.

Out of respect of one of the family and friends of a possible suspect, I won’t link to the YouTube video message they posted to him -- a missing person from Brown University.  There is NO proof that he is one of the suspects.  The point is however, that for better or worse, social media has been offering up connections and links to possible suspects, while the mainstream media has been holding back.  And in fact, the AP is now reporting online that the two suspects are actually from Chechnya.

BREAKING: AP: Surviving Boston bomb suspect identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass. -SS
— The Associated Press (@AP) April 19, 2013

Knowing now, that the two suspects had been throwing out explosive devices while in pursuit and later engaged in a wild shootout with officers, it's clear that they had meant to do a lot more damage than what they had done at the Boston Marathon.  If the FBI hadn't released those images to place tremendous pressure on these suspects, we could have seen a string of bombings; instead, their plans were fully disrupted, knowing that they were being actively pursued by law enforcement and social media.

Instead, we're nearing very close to the end of the situation, covered live by social media and broadcast via the internet.

If interested in the chase being tracked online: https://twitter.com/WCVB and http://livewire.wcvb.com/Event/117th_Running_of_Boston_Marathon

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By the way, even the suspect's history is being tracked online.  There's some confusion who this person is, and a lot of the media is now speculating that this 19 year old somehow received military training and may be linked to Al Qaeda, so the story is going to continue for some time.